Supercomputers have enabled breakthroughs in our ability to tackle a huge array of problems, from detailed studies of protein folding, to the dynamics of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
Current research in supercomputer architecture is poised to take us to the “exascale”, enabling systems capable of performing 1018 floating-point operations (or calculations) per second. By way of context, current home computers can perform on the order of billions ( 109 ) of floating-point operations per second.
But now, work by my colleagues and me has the potential to beat these exascale systems in a head-to-head match … by 80 orders of magnitude.
That's a lot. To read more, click here.